


Letters to You

by thomasjeffersonsmacaroni



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Implied Underage, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-29 00:39:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12619180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thomasjeffersonsmacaroni/pseuds/thomasjeffersonsmacaroni
Summary: When I first saw you, you had summer in your lips and sunlight in your eyes.





	Letters to You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amelia (not the ao3 user once again gdi)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Amelia+%28not+the+ao3+user+once+again+gdi%29).



> Happy belated (by three days, you skeleton demon) birthday, Amelia! I'm sorry I couldn't get this done sooner. I was writing something else, but I realized how much I hATED IT and decided to write this instead (I wrote it all in bio, chem, and after school sitting in the chem room). I like this a little better, and you, my friend, deserve the absolute best. I LOVE YOU MON AMI

_Letter Number One_

When I first saw you, you had summer in your lips and sunlight in your eyes.

“Poe Dameron,” you introduced yourself to me. “High school intern to Mr. Tekka. You won’t see me doing much, I’m just here ‘cause I want to be a pilot when I grow up. Mr. Tekka finally let me be with him on one of his flights.”

“Finn Skywalker,” I said, excited to make a new friend. “My dad and I are visiting some family in Cali. It’s nice to meet you.”

“That’s great. Say, did you know that this plane is the first one to be built under what is called the Andrew Jackson method?”

“What’s the Andrew Jackson method?” I asked, and the corner of your lip turned up in a smirk that nearly made me faint.

“You know what he was known for?”

“Being a bad president? And, uh, states’ rights or something. Spoils system.”

“Exactly! Getting commoners involved in decision making. The pilot, that’s Mr. Tekka, picks a passenger at random to fly the plane. The people’s rights are important and all. You gotta get people involved, you know?”

You burst into giggles then, and I couldn’t help but laugh with you, even though the joke wasn’t exactly peak humor.

“All right, I have to go now,” he said. “Mr. Tekka is calling me. See you later?”

“See you later,” I said, hoping with all my heart that I would. I walked back to my seat, and I let my dad have the window seat, something I don’t think I’ve ever done in my life. I sat in my chair, and I watched the flight attendants walk down the aisle, and I waited for one of them to deliver a message from you, even if it was something lame like “Hi, Finn, how’s the flight?”

But nothing ever happened. Nothing happened while we were up in the air, and nothing happened when we were disembarking, and nothing happened when my grandparents met us at the airport and Mr. Tekka the pilot waved us goodbye.

I tried to ignore it. But something in you made that impossible.

 

_Letter Number Two_

When I saw you again, your hair was filled with autumn, and your hands were as rough as the fading leaves.

We were in the same high school, apparently. I don’t know how we’d never noticed each other before junior year. I saw you in the breakfast line, and I held up my hand in a wave – ready to ask you why you’d brushed me off after the flight was over, why you walked past me like I was nothing but a part of the wall – but you met my eye and turned away.

It hurt, even though I didn’t know you that well. It hurt even more when we were in the same first period, and you chose to sit in the one desk that didn’t have a buddy rather than sit with me.

But I never questioned it. I mean, why would someone like you, who held himself like something of an angel and talked to everyone no matter what, even pay attention to me, the nerdy kid with the mountain full of books? Whatever had happened on the plane was probably something of a fluke.

And it’s not like I minded sitting next to Rey Kenobi anyway. We were best friends. We did friendship couple costumes every Halloween.

(I saw your costume of John C. Calhoun, by the way. No one else got it, but I did. I was dressed as a bumblebee, and Rey was dressed as a flower.) (Yes, we were running out of ideas. Don’t judge us.)

But all I wanted to know was, why? Why did you walk the other way when I was struggling with boxes of posters for the homecoming committee, and why did my cousin Ben of all people have to help me? Why is it that, when you were passing out our lab worksheets in bio, you handed two to my lab partner Jess, when you handed out the others individually?

Why, why, why?

 

_Letter Number Three_

When I saw you again, your nose was red and raw with winter, and your skin was pale from the cold.

I knew. Or, at least, I had my suspicions.

The same reason why, when Mr. Snoke had you read aloud that love poem in English, your eyes kept drifting back to me, even though you tried your hardest to focus them on all the girls in the class at once. The same reason why you submitted that short story to the newspaper about love tearing you apart from the inside.

(It was great, by the way. There was speculation in art class as to who it was about. Everyone suggested girls, even the ones you’d never talked to in your life, even though no pronouns were used at all.) (I read it three times and pinned it to the inside of my locker door.)

I wished I could catch you under some of the tissue paper mistletoe that Rey and I put up around the school as a prank. I wished that I could brush away that fear, brush away that worry, brush your curls away from your face and kiss you so hard that winter becomes summer and the earth flies out of the solar system. I wished you could talk to me.

I wished that we could have that conversation on the plane again.

For Christmas, I had Rey help me with one of those make-your-own-chocolate kits. Under the milk chocolate – your favorite – I left a note that said, _Please come talk to me. I miss you._ And then I wrote my number, and the pen slid off of the page so many times that the paper was thick with white-out.

I left the chocolate in your locker, along with a generic _Happy Holidays_ card. (I got the combination from your friend Temmin. I told him that I wanted to give you something for a project, but I don’t think he believed me.)

I answered every call. Normally, I just let unknown numbers ring, but I answered these. (I never knew how many spam calls one teenager could possibly get.) But none of them were you. As far as my phone was concerned, you were nonexistent.

I don’t think anyone noticed that something was up. But then again, I have a reputation for being invisible.

 

_Letter Number Three-and-a-half_

I saw you at my dad’s New Year’s party. You were in the guest bedroom with a guy I didn’t recognize.

You kissed him at the ball drop. I didn’t mean to watch you, but I did anyway. His eyes were closed, and his motions were like water flowing through a river: soft, fluid, confident.

You, on the other hand, were trembling like a wounded doe. Your eyes were open, and everything you did was choppy, startled, unsure. Your hair kept falling in front of your face, and I noticed how he never brushed it away.

You were drunk, probably, both of you. To him, you were just another guy at a party. I saw it in the way he looked at you: hungry, rough, impersonal.

In his arms, you found something. I saw it in the way you stopped trembling, in the way you eased into his arms.

I found that something, too. I found it in seventh grade, when a boy in my class taped a king-size candy bar to his valentine for me and told me that he liked me. And that something is a step.

But it’s not the end.

I hoped you would find the end.

 

_Letter Number Four_

When I see you for the fourth time, you glimmer with spring and new beginnings.

In first period math, Rey isn’t home from her vacation, so you move from your little island seat and over to me.

There’s a little bit of hair in front of your face. I see you brush it away with nervous fingers. It falls there again, and you move to brush it away over and over, but I take a hairclip out of my pocket and pin your hair back.

The math teacher is setting up her lecture. You look over at me and smile gratefully.

“So, you know the song ‘Blank Space’ by Taylor Swift?” I ask, remembering a joke that I’d seen while looking through my phone on the plane. I’d wanted to tell it to you when I saw you again, but I never got the chance.

Until now.

“Yeah,” you say warily. “Why?”

“So you know Henry VIII?”

You nod. And then you laugh, something you hadn’t done with me for months and months.

“I see where this is going, Finn,” you say. “And I want to tell you that you’re one hundred percent right.”

I smile. I don’t actually get the joke, but I’ll tell ten million more of them if it makes you laugh like that.

“You’re into English, right?” you ask. I nod.

“I actually, uh, don’t have any jokes for you. All I can think of is that ‘buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo’ is a grammatically correct sentence.”

I giggle. I knew that before – what kind of English nerd doesn’t? – but it’s still a classic.

“Finn, I just wanted to say…I’m sorry. You deserved better than being ignored because of my shitty issues.”

I take your hand, press it against my thigh. Your eyes are sparkling with tears and hope and brown, all mixing into one and shining through your face. I want to hug you, to press my lips against your forehead and tell you that it’s all going to be okay, but we’re in public. Maybe I’ll have time to do it later.

“They’re not shitty,” I say, and you don't question how I know. “And for the record, I forgive you. I’m sorry for not getting to know you earlier.

“Hey, so my dad is working part-time at a smoothie store, and he gets an employee’s discount. Want to come with me after school? I feel like we have a lot to talk about.”

“Yeah. I agree.”

And then I reach into my backpack and pull out my notebook. There isn’t much written in it, and I pull out four pieces of paper that I’ve written on, and I give them to you with shaking hands.

“I think you should read these,” I say.

You put them away. “I promise I will.”

And then, as math class officially begins, I feel like a flower is breaking through the cracks of the concrete of us.

Maybe, just maybe, things will be okay after all.


End file.
